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Academic profile

Marjet Brolsma is a PhD-candidate and lecturer at the department of European Studies, University of Amsterdam . She studied cultural history and journalism at the University of Groningen and the Humboldt University in Berlin. In 2006 she started working on her PhD-thesis on cultural criticism in the Netherlands in the interwar period. She currently teaches the BA-courses Europese Integratie and Introduction European Studies. Areas of interest include: cultural transfer and transnational history, modern history of Germany and the Netherlands and media history.

Current research

PhD-project (2006-2011): ‘The Humanitarian moment. Dutch intellectuals and the crisis of the European civilization in the 1920s’. Supervisors: prof. dr. Frits Boterman and prof. dr. Michael Wintle.

'Aboarding school for girls’(Von der Dunk),‘the sleepwalk’ (Daalder) or ‘Europe’s provinces’ (Van Wessem); the interwar period in the Netherlands is characterized with a series of remarkable metaphors. According to these persistent conceptions, the Netherlands was an indolent, narrow-minded, conservative and remote corner of Europe, that was introduced to modernity only with the invasion of the Nazis in May 1940. Recent studies however, have shown that the proposition that the Netherlands deviated radically from the European modernization process is no longer tenable. Likewise, currently new perceptions evolved on the ‘pillarization’ (or: verzuiling) as an ‘anti-modern phenomenon’ and on the Dutch neutrality during the First World War. To put it briefly: the Dutch experience with modernity between the two world wars was far more complex than formerly assumed.

This PhD-thesis explores the Dutch interwar perception of modernity by reconstructing cultural criticism of the intellectual ‘Humanitarian movement’ in the 1920s. Although the Netherlands remained neutral during 1914-1918, the country couldn’t escape the First World War’s impact as a cultural catalyst. According to Dutch intellectuals, the war affirmed the bankruptcy of rationalism, intensified a discomfort with European civilization, and increased the fear of moral decay. But the Dutch were no cultural pessimists; optimism regarding the future was widespread. Despite the war’s depravity, most intellectuals were still confident about the possibilities for human improvement and eager to find new values to restore the lost link between individual and community. Like elsewhere in Europe, the end of the war and the prospect of peace were widely embraced as harbingers for renewal. No doubt the most vocal exponents of this European postwar urge for regeneration in the Netherlands were the intellectuals of the Humanitarian movement, who sought a new ‘universal’ and ‘cosmic’ religion upon which to found a new culture.

Though their blueprints for a ‘new world’ differed –resulting, for example, in a Dostoyevsky cult, efforts to reconcile the European intellect, or in propagating the ‘affirmation’ of life – Humanitarians shared the conviction that change should be achieved intellectually through ideas, rather than through social or political action. They were deeply inspired by Hegel’s philosophy and sought to resolve what they regarded as the shortcomings of traditional Christianity and the socialist ideology of historical materialism, resulting in an uprising of religious-socialism and religious-anarchism. In placing the cultural criticism of the Humanitarian movement within the larger, transnational context of European debates on modernity and European cultural reorientation after the First World War, this study stresses the cultural transfer of, among other writings, Oswald Spengler’s Der Untergang des Abendlandes (1918-1922) and Julien Benda’s La Trahison des Clercs (1927), to the Dutch discourse and explores the interaction of the Dutch Humanitarians with ethical regeneration movements abroad. By the end of the 1920s, as Europe was confronted with an economic depression, political polarization, the waning of democracy and totalitarian threats, the enraptured, often bombastic and loose idealism of the Humanitarian movement no longer seemed appropriate. As is illustrated by the assault on the periodical De Stem (‘The Voice’) – the movement’s most important mouthpiece – the Humanitarians ultimately gave way to a new generation of more realistic and politically engaged intellectuals.

Publications

• ‘Cultuurtransfer en het tijdschriftonderzoek’ , Contextes. Revue de sociologie de la literature 4, http://contextes.revues.org/sommaire2983.html (October 2008) (3191 words).

• ‘Bespiegelingen overde ondergangvan het Avondland. Een casestudynaar cultuurtransfer in Nederlandse tijdschriften’, TS. Tijdschrift voor tijdschriftstudies 24 (2008), 38-61.

• Review of: Götz Aly en Michael Sontheimer, 'Fromms. Wie der jüdische Kondomfabrikant Julius F. unter die deutschen Räuber fiel', Tijdschrift voor geschiedenis 2 (2008), 248-249.

• Review of NIOD Jaarboek: 'Moderniteit. Modernisme en massacultuur in Nederland 1914-1940', Tijdschrift voor geschiedenis, 4 (2005) 628-629.

• ‘Op den uitkijk tegen de Duitsche indringing’, in: J.H.J. Andriessen, Martin Ros en Perry Pieriks ed., De Grote Oorlog - Kroniek 1914-1918, deel 6 (Soesterberg 2004) 113-315. (MA-thesis)

• 'Pennenoorlog op neutrale bodem', De Groene Amsterdammer (6-4-2007). (article in opinion weekly on the polemic debates between German, French, English and Dutch intellectuals during the First World War)

• ‘Ganz Holland ist jetzt dada’, De Groene Amsterdammer (6-4-2007). (article on Theo van Doesburg's and Kurt Schwitters' ‘dadaistic campaign’ in the Netherlands in 1923)

Link to: De Grote Oorlog, deel 6

Link to: ‘Cultuurtransfer en het tijdschriftonderzoek’

Film

• Ne Tarmazi (2003) (documentary about the youth opposition in Belarus , co-production with Gerhard Stoel, Thalia Verkade and Franka Hummels)

Stichting ThankEve Productions